Blog

Well, this is likely to be a fairly brief post as I’m not aware of many use cases of metadata in PDFs from scholarly publishers. Certainly, I can say for Nature that we haven’t done much in this direction yet although are now beginning to look into this.

I’ll discuss a couple cases found in the wild but invite comment as to others’ practices. Let me start though with the CNRI handle plugin demo for Acrobat which I blogged here.

Just announced on the handle-info list is a new plugin from CNRI for Acrobat Reader - see here. The announcement says: _“It is intended to demonstrate the utility of embedding a identifying handle in a PDF document. … A set of demonstration documents, each with an embedded identifying handle, is packaged with the plug-in to show potential uses. To make productive use of this technology, a given industry or community of

Well, it all went very quiet for a while but glad to see that the URI Template Internet-Draft has just been republished: _“A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories. Title : URI Template Author(s) : J. Gregorio, et al. Filename : draft-gregorio-uritemplate-01.txt Pages : 9 Date : 2007-7-23 URI Templates are strings that can be transformed into URIs after embedded variables are substituted. This document defines the

<span >(<b>Update - 2007.07.28:</b> I meant to reference in this entry Pierre Lindenbaum’s post back in May <a href="http://plindenbaum.blogspot.com/2007/05/is-there-any-xmp-in-scientific-pdf-no.html">Is there any XMP in scientific pdf ? (No)</a>, which btw also references Roderic Page’s post on <a href="http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2007/05/xmp.html">XMP</a> but forgot to add in the links in my haste to scoot off. Well, truth is we still can’t answer Pierre in the affirmative but at least we can take the first steps towards rectifying this.)

<span >I’ve been revisiting Adobe’s <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/">XMP</a> just recently. (I blogged <a href="/blog/xmp-capabilities-extended//">here</a> about the new <a href="http://www.adobe.com/devnet/xmp/">XMP Toolkit 4.1</a> back in March.)

<span >I wanted to share some of my early experiences. First off, after a couple of previous attempts which got pushed aside due to other projects, I managed to compile the libraries and the sample apps that ship with the C++ SDK under Xcode on the Mac. I also needed to compile <a href="https://libexpat.github.io/">Expat</a> first which doesn’t ship with the distribution.

<span >OK, so far, so good. What this basically leaves one with is a couple of XMP dump utilities (<i>DumpMainXMP</i> and <i>DumpScannedXMP</i>) and two others (<i>XMPCoreCoverage</i> and <i>XMPFilesCoverage</i>) which is a good start anyways for exploring. And turns out that our PDFs already have some workflow metadata in them. This is encouraging because the SDK allows apps to read and update existing XMP packets from files, though not to write new packets into files (as far as I understand).

<span >I thought I would take this opportunity anyway to:

1. <span >See what XMP metadata terms we might consider adding

• <span >Try and add these to existing XMP packets<span >Ugly details are presented below, but by updating the XMP packet metadata in one of our PDFs (<i>Nature 445, 37 (2007), C.J. Hogan</i>) we can teach Acrobat Reader to read - see the “before” (<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130815224916/http://0-nurture-nature-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/">PDF here</a>) and “after” (<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130815224916/http://0-nurture-nature-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/">PDF here</a>) screenshots in the figure.

  <span ><img src="/wp/blog/images/acrobats.png" alt="acrobats.png" width="583" height="466" />

  <span >Of course, this is really about much more than getting Adobe apps to read/write metadata. It’s about using XMP as a standard platform for embedding metadata in digital assets for <i>third-party apps</i> to read/write. If we can put ID3 tags into our podcasts then why not XMP packets into other media?</p>

With these words: _“There was quite some interest in Linked Data at this year’s World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007). Therefore, Richard Cyganiak, Tom Heath and I decided to write a tutorial about how to publish Linked Data on the Web, so that interested people can find all relevant information, best practices and references in a single place.”_ Chris Bizer announces this draft How to Publish Linked Data on the Web. It’s a bright and breezy tutorial and useful (to me, anyway) for disclosing a couple of links:

Seems that there’s life in the old dog yet. :~) See this post about PURL from Thom Hickey, OCLC, This extract: OCLC has contracted with Zepheira to reimplement the PURL code which has become a bit out of date over the years. The new code will be in written in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Just posted on Nascent a brief account of a presentation I gave recently on OTMI at BioNLP 2007. The post lists some of the feedback I received. We are very interested to get further comments so do feel free to contribute comments either directly to the post, privately to otmi@nature.com, or publicly to otmi-discuss@crossref.org. And then there’s always the OTMI wiki available for comment at http://opentextmining.org/. It is important to note that OTMI is not a universal panacea but rather an attempt at bridging the gap between publisher and researcher.

Nice entry article on PRISM here by Uche Ogbuji, Fourthought Inc. on IBM’s DeveloperWorks.

The other day Ed and I visited the OECD to talk about all things e-publishig. At the end of our our meeting, Toby Green, the OECD’s head of publishing, handed all 30+ meeting attendees a copy of their well-known OECD Factbook- on a USB stick. Before you dismiss this as a gimick- note that organizations like the OECD get a lot of political and marketing mileage with “leave behinds”- print copies of their key reports, conference proceedings and reference works.

OASIS has just announced a technical committee for standardising search services. This from the Call for Participation: _ b. Purpose To define Search and Retrieval Web Services, combining various current and ongoing web service activities. Within recent years there has been a growth in activity in the development of web service definitions for search and retrieval applications. These include SRU, a web service based in part on the NISO/ISO Search and Retrieval standards;